The present invention relates to the field of information technology, including, more particularly, to systems and techniques for backing up and restoring data.
A backup or the process of backing up is making copies of data which may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. Examples of data loss events include data deletion or corruption (e.g., natural disasters, fire, floods, earthquake, human error, software bugs, hardware failure, or software viruses). Backups may also be used to recover data from an earlier time.
A block-based backup system can backup data (e.g., files and directories) block-by-block. Existing techniques to provide file-based recoveries from block-based backups require traversing the entire file system tree which can be very inefficient. For example, such traversing can consume a significant amount of computing resources.
Thus, there is a need to provide systems and techniques to increase the efficiency of data backup and recovery systems.